


sunshine riptide

by ficklish



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Jean-centric, M/M, riko is mentioned in passing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 15:42:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16558568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficklish/pseuds/ficklish
Summary: Every day, Jean wakes up just as the world outside his window is beginning to blush with the first of the day's sunlight.written for the aftgbingo 2018 jerejean card [the color yellow + one of them is an artist]





	sunshine riptide

**Author's Note:**

> title from [that one fall out boy song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgj5-vwkFwQ)
> 
> this is really short but i've wanted to write for this fandom for yEARS and now i finally have!! (•̀ᴗ•́)و

Every day, Jean wakes up just as the world outside his window is beginning to blush with the first of the day's sunlight. It's a habit he picked up even before the Nest, back in Marseille; his family used to have a house by the coast, and every morning Jean would watch the sun set fire to the sea through his bedroom window, lungs full of briny air, as the curl of the tide along the shore beckoned to him like an old friend.

As a child, he'd often tried to capture the view from his bedroom window, fingers and face tight and itchy with smudges drying paint. He’d had nothing but time after all, since he was rarely allowed outside. "Too dangerous," his father would say, on the few occasions where he seemed to remember that Jean exists. It was better than his mother, at least, who looked at him like she wished he didn't.

Jean hadn't understood, at the time, what his father meant. These days, he wonders if, had his father not sold him to the Master, the Moriyamas would have balanced the red in their ledger by spilling his blood. Some days—on his worst days—he wonders if that might have been a far less cruel fate.

"Looks like liquid gold, doesn't it?" One of the maids who used to take care of him had once said about the sea at sunrise when she brought him breakfast. It'd been a Tuesday, and for a moment, with dawn bleeding across the horizon, almost bright enough to hurt, the sun had looked so close, hanging heavy amongst the still-dark clouds like a ripe fruit. Jean, his face pressed almost flush against the window pane, had felt like he could just reach out and pluck it from the sky.

That very day, he'd dug through his box of paints, giddy fingers closing around an old tube of gold paint. He'd smeared it across a new page in his battered sketchbook, thumbs working the colour into the deep blue of the sea, the white crests of waves, trying frantically, almost desperately, to transfer the memory of that blinding view onto paper, to make it into something he could touch.

But no matter how hard he'd tried, he could never manage to get it right. Eventually, he'd run out of gold paint, and asking for more hadn't been an option.

Then, on a whim one evening, by the temperamental light of his bedside lamp, he'd squeezed a dollop of bright yellow paint onto his finger and spread it almost carelessly across the page and— _oh_. That had been the closest Jean ever got, and holding the finished piece up against the next morning's sunrise, Jean had felt a little breathless, a little like he was holding a piece of the sky in his hands.

Jean doesn't paint anymore. He used to for a while, back when he’d first arrived at the Nest. But then Riko had made a game out of breaking his fingers—of breaking _him_ , and eventually Jean learned to strip his life down to the bare-bones of what he needed to survive Riko. Painting hadn't been essential to his continued survival, so he stopped.

And it had been easy when all he woke up to, all he ever saw, was the harsh glare of fluorescents straining against the overwhelming black and red, black and red, black and red.

These days, however, he gets to wake up on the cusp of dawn and watch as the buttery rays of morning sunlight melt slowly through the cracks in his dorm room blinds. There's no grand view beyond these windows, no sea breeze or the gentle whisper of waves. Instead, right outside is the student parking lot, silent this early in the morning, with sunlight glinting off the sea of cars, and the only sounds in the room are his and Jeremy's mingled breaths, sleep-warm against each other’s skin as they take in the bedroom air that always smells faintly of that godawful cologne Jeremy insists on using.

Jean doesn't paint anymore. But, some days, before Jeremy's alarm goes off, Jean lies on his side and watches the morning light play over Jeremy's features, highlighting new freckles and catching on chapped lips that have been chewed pink, and he feels the familiar urge start up like a fine tremor in his palms—the almost desperate need to use his own two hands to capture a beautiful sight on paper.

**Author's Note:**

> feedback is always appreciated!! 
> 
> [writing tumblr](http://neiljortsens.tumblr.com)   
>  [twitter](https://twitter.com/neiljortsens)


End file.
